Billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firm, have announced their support for Donald Trump’s reelection bid, stating they will make hefty donations to his campaign.

“The future of our business, the future of new technology, and the future of America is literally at stake,” Horowitz (pictured) said during a 90-minute podcast made for the purpose of explaining why they’re putting all their eggs in the Trump basket. “For Little Tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice – sorry Mom, I know you’re going to be mad at me for this, but we had to do it.”

Silicon Valley and much of the tech milieu globally have traditionally had moderate to left views, at least on social issues, despite a longtime, strong libertarian streak. But a number of mega-wealthy tech entrepreneurs have recently voiced support of Trump and talked about sharing some of their hard-earned cash for his campaign to return to the White House — though many of them had already expressed a preference for Trump.

One of those entrepreneurs is Elon Musk, the mercurial tech boss who just yesterday said he is going to move his companies X Corp. and Space X Corp. out of California due to new laws that he considers overly progressive. After Trump was very nearly assassinated, Musk said he planned to donate a staggering $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign.

Other tremendously wealthy tech leaders are on board with Trump. Palantir Technologies Inc. co-founder Joe Lonsdale has committed to Trump’s campaign, as have crypto billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the men who famously thought they’d been badly treated by Facebook Inc. creator Mark Zuckerberg. The tech investor Peter Thiel is also backing Trump.

Andreessen said the “final straw” was Joe Biden’s plan to start taxing unrealized capital gains at 25% annually, a so-called tax on billionaires. He believes the plan will hurt startup founders who are far from being billionaires. “This makes startups completely implausible, because why on earth is anyone going to do this instead of going to work for Google and getting paid a lot of money in cash,” he said. Apparently changing the world is no longer even the stated reason for starting a company.

Horowitz echoed these sentiments, stating that some of his friends in the tech space will be “pissed off” for saying “anything nice about President Trump” but he feels Trump is a better choice where tech is concerned. He admitted to not being an expert on other areas of governance. This is all about tech, he said.

Their belief can perhaps be summed up in a blog post Horowitz wrote late last year. “We are non-partisan, one-issue voters: if a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them,” he wrote. “If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.”

Photo: TechCrunch